John Casteen’s poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Lo-Ball, and other magazines; his first book, Free Union, appeared from the University of Georgia Press in 2009. He teaches at Sweet Briar College, and serves on the editorial staff ofThe Virginia Quarterly Review. The poems here are from his second collection, For the Mountain Laurel (University of Georgia Press, 2011).
If you don’t hear from me, everything’s fine. In pressurized, recumbent air, trans-continental, 38,000 feet above the fruited plain, America I bring you truer sustenance than food. Careful, careful; everything here happens in the present tense. The word forgetful has no opposite but instinct: ketone stench of ditch-deer, ditch-dog. Souring. Each humiliation, each indecisive moment. […]
I. In this life you get to keep what you can defend. When the wind turns right from here I hear the small jets encompass the tarmac; on standby people sigh the all-done sigh of turbines spooling up. Salarymen settle in, studying their Palms. So: the pewter-complected sky a […]
In the cold and sun-shot heart of February, North wind bearing down hard like a hand on a blunt knife’s back: Here, here’s how the narrative can’t read. One year, short of work, I took to the woods. A man of enthusiasms, they say, and mines were there. As if I could hunt my […]
Jive-ass little epiphanies. Nystagmic dawn-fire. Scamper and frolic of the forest in spring; pale sunrise settles in a mud-rimmed dish of rain, pale christly spatter of wild dogwood, cruciform, mid-April. At my footfall, two doe canter creekward, slanting down and cross-hill, unhurrying. You got to treat people like they treat themselves, got to bring […]
John Casteen talks about the genesis of his poem “Generation X.”
John Casteen talks about reading his work aloud as he writes.